Chapter | fourteen

Rewriting: Now the Real Work Begins

You'll hear people say “writing is rewriting,” but you won't quite understand or believe it until you do it yourself. If you thought writing that scene was hard, try staring at it for hours trying to diagnose why it doesn't work.

Sometimes rewriting is teeth-grittingly unfun – you feel like you're playing Jenga with something that took you months of hard work to assemble. Other times, though – when a single tiny change or cut brings an entire scene into sudden clarity, like pulling focus on a camera – rewriting can make you feel like a genius at play.

You finished the latest draft. You let it sit for a week or so. You even sent it off to friends and colleagues and got some valuable feedback.

Now it's time to rewrite. But …

There's that creeping sense of doubt. You don't want to do the work, so you start to wonder whether the work is really necessary. Maybe your first draft is great? Maybe your friends’ critiques are wrong – or hell, maybe they're just jealous of your amazing draft?

What if you sent your script out now – would it be good enough to get you an agent or a manager? And hey, maybe you don't want to send it out or show it to anyone? Couldn't you just say it's done and move on to the next thing?

No, no, and no. Your draft is not “good enough,” not for other people and not for you. If you don't take the time to do a proper and thorough rewrite, you're screwing yourself out of a major part of the screenwriting process. If you never rewrite, you will never get better as a writer. You need to do it, and you need to do it properly. End of story.

So that's the bad news. Here's the good news: rewriting's not quite as hard as everyone says.

Not when compared to outlining or writing the first draft, it's not. Never again will you have to face the tyranny of the blank page – it's all right there for you to work with. You won't have the uncertainty of not knowing quite where you're going because you'll always have the rest of the script there to serve as a roadmap.

Even when you're performing major cuts or writing an entirely new scene, you'll be surrounded on all sides by already written scenes – your own personal structural safety net. The story exists. You wrote it down. And working on it will never again be as scary as it was during the first draft.

The only thing hard about rewriting is that it requires a lot of time and a great deal of concentration. No longer will you be able to enjoy flights of fancy or inspired, semi-automatic writing (“It was like the characters were speaking to me!”). Instead you'll have to carefully and rigorously consider every single word, from dialog to scene description to action.

Mark Twain said, “Write drunk and edit sober.” He meant that you can be as loose and carefree as you want in the first draft as long as you treat the rewrite with all the seriousness of an IRS audit. Once, you might have been a divine medium. But now? Now, you're an engineer.

Many writers rebel against this, for obvious reasons. We got into this game for the chance to express ourselves creatively, and now we have to work hard and make sacrifices? Man, if we wanted a real job, we would have become a real estate agent or a shady stock broker.

Fight that angry little voice. Suppress that urge to slack off on the rewrite. Improving and fine-tuning your script is not homework or a mindless office job that you can half-ass your way through. Rewriting is part of your art, and all art involves a little bit of suffering. Just be glad you don't have to cut off your ear.

So what are you actually trying to accomplish in a rewrite? Well, every rewrite has a different objective – your first pass might be about tying together the protagonist's motivations and choices, and the next pass might focus entirely on the jokes. But in general, here's what you're trying to do:

Fix errors. Yeah, this scene has made no sense ever since you removed that subplot. These typos and grammatical problems need to be fixed. And this section? It's possible you were taking Mark Twain's “write drunk” advice very seriously when you wrote this bit. The chief job of the rewrite is to fix those embarrassing errors that you would never want to show to anybody.

Lose what doesn't work. Sometimes the funniest, coolest scene in your script is the one that totally screws your pacing. Or maybe, try as you might, you just couldn't integrate your favorite secondary character into the main plot. Be ruthless. If it doesn't quite work, and you don't know how to fix it, it's probably just slowing you down.

Bring it all back to the protagonist. The number one problem with all amateur spec scripts – the ubiquitous, mutating flu virus of the screenwriting slush pile – is the weak protagonist. Plot and action are happening around her, but the protagonist herself is a void. Go back and make sure every single act break and turning point ties into the protagonist's emotional state in the strongest way possible.

Make sure the characters sound like themselves. Often it takes the experience of writing the first draft for you to “find” the characters’ voices. For instance: back in Act 1, you weren't quite sure how the love interest was supposed to speak, so you wrote him as wordy and boastful. But by Act 3 you had a much better handle on his character, and you switched to writing him as shy and guarded. Use the rewrite to go back and fix that early dialog so that all the characters sound the way they should.

Add what's missing. No sense of threat or stakes in Act 2? You'll want to add a ticking clock. Antagonist's plans and motivation opaque? Add her into a few more scenes and give her more dialog. Identify what's missing in your script and add it in. After all, you've got plenty of room now that you cut all the stuff that wasn't working.

Once you've achieved all these objectives, you've got yourself a second draft. Congratulations … but you're not finished. That was just the first rewrite. It might take you five, ten, or even twenty rewrites to get your script to where it needs to be.

If you think you can sit down and bang that out in a few hours, then good luck to you. But ultimately, you're not fooling anybody but yourself. Comprehensive rewrites take time, concentration, and dedication. If you find yours is a breeze, you're probably doing it wrong.

The use of passive writing is making your script weaker. It is cheapening your action and slowing down your pacing. It really is sucking –

Ahem. Excuse me. Let's try that again:

Passive writing makes your script weaker. It cheapens your action and slows down your pacing. It really sucks, as that horrible first paragraph ably demonstrates, and it has no business being in your screenplay.

Unfortunately, it's probably already in there, somewhere. It's very hard to completely avoid passive writing when writing a first draft. It's a bit like studiously trying to avoid the latest manufactured teen pop star – you know you'll eventually have to give up and Google the little monster just so you can get by in polite society.

What are we talking about when we talk about passive writing? This kind of garbage:

Agent Trask watches the gunman entering the bank, ordering the customers to the ground, vaulting over the barrier and holding his gun to the manager's head.

Or:

The party is heating up. Lynn and Kate are doing tequila shots, Angie and Terry are making out in the corner, and Dave is puking into the pot-plants.

See how it lacks any kind of immediacy? There's no forward momentum. The pace of the prose is completely out of whack because we're now an instant behind the moment (“it is happening”) rather than in the moment (“it happens”).

This is easily fixed:

Agent Trask watches as the gunman enters the bank, orders the customers to the ground, vaults over the barrier, and holds his gun to the manager's head.

And:

The party heats up. Lynn and Kate do tequila shots, Angie and Terry make out in the corner, and Dave pukes into the pot-plants.

You'll notice that the Find function won't actually pick up all these instances of passive writing, because not all of them involve a word like “is” or “are.” The Find function is a good start, but you'll probably have to go through your script page by page and manually fix the remaining errors.

Believe me, it'll be worth it. You don't want this kind of sloppy, laid-back writing bogging down your screenplay.

However (and you just knew there was a caveat coming, didn't you?), there are times when passive writing is not only appropriate but also useful. It works as a legitimate stylistic choice on those rare occasions when the writer actually wants to slow down the pace of the action and put the reader at a slight remove from the script's events.

When would you ever want to do that? Maybe in action scenes. Try the following on for size:

The gunman turns – sees Agent Trask standing there. Trask goes for his pistol and –

Time stops.

The vault alarm RINGING. The two men staring each other down. Customers SCREAMING, running for the exits. Trask raising his gun, as –

The gunman dives behind the vault door.

See how the passive use of “it is happening” lines creates a sense of being outside the moment? It can be used to sneakily suggest slow-motion or rubber-banding of time without actually having to write “SLO-MO.”

If you're clever – and I know you are – I'm sure you'll be able to come up with other interesting uses for passive action writing. With some practice, you'll be able to turn an annoying error that distances the reader and slows down the read into a smart stylistic choice.

As long as you don't write, “Dave is puking,” I think we'll be fine.

Every writing book will tell you that the plot must grow organically from the protagonist. Who she is, what she wants, and what she's willing to do to get it – these are the seeds that grow into a story. When it comes to rewriting, if you change a story element, you'd better damn well show how that change affects the protagonist.

But here's a dirty little secret that they don't tell you: you can reverse-engineer character from plot. That's right – you can go back and change a character so that she fits into the events of the script you've already written.

Let's say your story is a drama, the themes of which deal with the vagaries of fate and chance. You've written your story so that the protagonist's boyfriend is killed in a car crash during the Dark Point. The scene has a huge emotional impact on her … but it just seems so out-of-left-field. It doesn't quite fit with the protagonist's arc – it's just a big old sad thing that happens. How do you fix this?

You go back and change it so that the protagonist's parents died in a similar crash, way back in the mists of her backstory. And by making that change, you'll have subtly altered her character. Maybe she's nervous whenever she gets into cars, or whenever she can't get in contact with loved ones? Maybe she holds onto relationships a little too tightly out of fear that she might lose someone again? Suddenly her relationship with the doomed boyfriend becomes even more poignant, and his death seems like the manifestation of all her worst fears.

There you go: a stronger Dark Point, better integrated into the themes of the script, plus a new spin on the protagonist's characterization.

(I chose this example because it's a quick-fix solution to that old Dark Point trope of one of the protagonist's loved ones dropping dead.)

This is not the “proper” way to craft a screenplay. In fact, this method of rewriting might charitably be called a “hack” (as in an inelegant solution, not a crappy writer). But if it works for you and it gets results, then there's nothing stopping you from using it.

Ah, the feedback process. For many writers, it goes a little something like this:

•  Line up three or four close friends and colleagues whom you trust to give valuable feedback on your latest script. Promise to send it to them today.

•  Obsessively rewrite for three days. Change tiny lines of dialog, then change them back again. Finally, bite the bullet and email the script out.

•  Five minutes after the email is sent, notice a really obvious spelling error.

•  Wait by the phone/computer for your friends’ reply. Alternatively, pester them on Facebook. Get inexplicably angrier with each day that passes without a reply. Don't they know this is your masterpiece?!

•  Pray/drink/cry.

•  A week later, get a reply by email. Read it once and realize that although it's thoughtful and well-reasoned, it is also critical of some of your favorite bits in the script.

•  Delete that friend from your contact list and never speak to her again.

So clearly there are a few problems with that approach.

Number one: you obviously didn't run spell-check. Number two: when you ask someone to give you feedback, you owe it to yourself and your reviewer to actually read and absorb that feedback.

Read your friend's email twice. Then read it once more, carefully. What is your friend really trying to say? Is your friend projecting his own opinions or is he actually giving valuable, objective advice? Did the friend actually like the script or is this just a litany of criticisms?

(They probably did say that they liked it. It's right there at the start of the email. You just conveniently ignored that part because you've conditioned yourself to be suspicious of praise.)

Above all, you need to figure out what kind of criticism your reviewers are giving you. Here are the four most likely scenarios:

They wimped out. There's no useful feedback here. Either they profess to find no fault in it at all, or they praise you generally while suggesting tiny changes (“What if the main character had a dog?” “What if the two leads met at Denny's instead of IHOP?”). The most probable explanation is that these readers are not a film/television person, and you made a mistake by sending your script to them. This happens occasionally, and it's really nobody's fault. Thank them politely and cross them off your list of trusted readers.

They're horribly wrong. They've missed the point entirely, and you can safely discount the whole of their criticism. For example, they thought the problem with your Holocaust drama was that it wasn't funny enough. Or maybe they just couldn't stand your British protagonist because they have an irrational fear of British people.

This scenario is actually incredibly rare. You picked these people because they're intelligent friends whose script knowledge and instincts you trust. What are the odds that they totally missed the point of your script? If I were you, I'd carefully examine all of their points before declaring them 100 percent wrong.

They're horribly right. This possibility is much more likely. They hit every problem, exposed every flaw … and it kills you to admit it. That character that you suspected was underdeveloped? They thought so too. That scene that didn't quite make sense as you were writing it? They couldn't understand it either. You can't dismiss a single one of their criticisms. They've laid bare all the flaws in your script, and it's so overwhelming that you just want to curl up in a ball and die.

Congratulations – you just got some great feedback. The rule of thumb is: if it hurts you, then it's accurate. This is exactly what you were hoping for when you asked for feedback in the first place. It's time to pick yourself up off the floor, woman up, and confront that email again. Go through every one of its points and use them to come up with an action plan for the rewrite. Maybe send a follow-up email to clarify some of the points made by the reader. You may even want to call your friend on the phone, run your proposed solutions by him, and generally pester that friend as much as you can without pissing her off.

They're right about the big things and wrong about the little things. This is the most likely scenario. It's probable that two-thirds or more of your responses will be like this. This is when your reader knows that something is wrong but can't quite put into words what that something is.

For example, she might suggest that your protagonist's brother is boring and should be removed. You might initially balk at that – after all, you know that the brother is supposed to be vitally important to your protagonist's character development, and their relationship forms a major part of the plot in Act 2. So you immediately reject the suggestion to remove him.

But look deeper – your reader is suggesting that there's a problem with that character, something deeper than just “he's boring.” Ask yourself: are you giving the brother enough screen time? You know he's an interesting character, so why isn't that coming across? Could the emotional ties between him and the protagonist be made stronger? Your reader was wrong about the little things (the brother being “boring”) but right about the big things (problems with characterization and connecting it all back to the protagonist).

Your job is to examine your readers’ feedback and sift the useful from the useless. But always give them the benefit of the doubt – they may be wrong about some things, but right about other, connected things.

Now you know how to receive advice … but what about giving advice to others? It's something of a learned skill. Here are the basics:

Open with praise. I cannot stress how important this is. Writers tend to take criticism of their work extremely seriously. Anything that even remotely suggests that they could maybe, possibly, think about changing a small part of their script – you know, only if they want to – will be taken as a negative. So you have to soften the blow. Find something nice to say about their script – anything – and open with that. Put it right at the start of your feedback so the writer knows that you had at least one nice thing to say. Then launch into the bad news.

If this makes writers sound like precious, precious snowflakes who need constant validation, that's because, well, we are. Like actors, we put our innermost thoughts, dreams, and emotions out there for all the world to see. We sell ourselves, and it hurts a little to find out that nobody's buying.

Focus on the macro, not the micro. Don't tell your screenwriter friend that her protagonist shouldn't have worn a pink sweater – tell her you didn't think the protagonist's personality was coherent enough. Don't say that bus explosion set-piece was ridiculous and hard to believe – say the overall action was unclear, and the action scenes could be more grounded.

In other words: lead the horse to water, but don't shove its face in the lake and yell “Drink, you bastard!” Frame your suggestions as large-scale issues, not as specific scene-by-scene problems. Otherwise writers may feel as though you're nit-picking, which will cause them to shut down and stop listening to your advice. Because we're weird and defensive, remember?

Try to see the best version of their script. If you take nothing else away from this chapter, remember this: if you want to give someone real, genuine, useful advice on their script, you have to imagine the best possible version of their concept.

For example, you personally might think the idea of a screwball comedy about a politician trying to find his lucky pen the night before an election is ridiculous, and the writer's take on the concept isn't so great, either. Here's what you do: close your eyes, clear your mind, and imagine the best goddamn version of a screwball comedy about a politician trying to find his lucky pen the night before an election that you possibly can. Then tell your friend exactly what she needs to hear to get her to that perfect version of the script.

Unless you absolutely adored the script, giving feedback is no fun. And getting it isn't exactly a picnic, either. But if you can cultivate a trusted circle of clever readers and writers who are similar to you in skill level, you'll be adding a powerful new weapon to your rewriting arsenal.

There's a persistent myth that script readers only read the first ten pages of a script, and if they don't like what they read, into the “circular file” it goes.

This is not true. Script readers don't do this (or if they do, they're not doing their job properly). They actually have to write coverage on every single script that comes to them, and part of coverage involves writing a synopsis on the whole script – all three acts.

No, script readers aren't allowed to throw your screenplay in the trash if they don't like the first page. The only people who can do that are everyone else in Hollywood.

Managers, agents, executives, showrunners, actors you met a party – none of them are under any obligation to read your goddamn script. And unlike script readers, who are secretly hoping they'll love your script and be able to champion it to their bosses, everyone else in Hollywood is hoping your script will suck so they'll be able to stop reading it. These people work ridiculously long hours. They just don't have a spare hour and a half to waste on reading your screenplay. They want to find an excuse, any excuse, to put it down forever.

Your job is to not give them one.

They want to see less-than-confident prose in the action paragraphs. They want to see dialog that sounds identical no matter which character's mouth it's coming out of. They want a bad title and a stupid quote on the first page. They want character names that no mortal could pronounce, let alone remember.

They're looking for a thankless role no actor would actually want to play, a protagonist who lets everyone else speak and act for her, and a theme that's not clearly spelled out in the first few pages. They want to have no idea what the story is about, or even what genre they're dealing with, after the first few scenes. They want to put it down after ten pages and have no inkling of an idea of what kind of journey the protagonist was about to embark on.

Most of all, they want to be bored and disengaged from the story, always viewing the characters at a distance, unable to get inside their heads and feel what they're feeling. They don't want to feel a confident, human voice speaking to them through the script. They want to resist the spell of your fiction. They do not want to believe.

But you're not going to give them what they want. Because your first page is a thing of beauty. Of course it is – you had months and months to hammer away at your script, revising it and improving it through feedback from trusted friends. You studied your craft – not just scripts, but other fiction, too – and learned how to hook a reader with a few deft sentences and dramatic questions. You put special care and extra time into the first few pages of your script, because you know that first impressions matter.

Your Page One is a thing of beauty. Isn't it?

Screenwriting Tip #131:

100 pages is the new 120 pages. Cut it down.

Screenwriting Tip #133:

Just as you'd cut a sentence down to its leanest, strongest form, so should you cut a scene down to its leanest, strongest emotion.

Screenwriting Tip #135:

Almost everything in your script can serve more than one purpose. Jokes can also define character, action scenes can advance the plot, emotional moments can foreshadow doom further down the line. Anything that's not multipurpose is a candidate for cutting.